Case Study: Ancestry.com achieves data-driven insights and visualizes billions of records with Tableau Software

Ancestry.com visualizes billions of rows of data, establishes a data-driven future

Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family‑history resource with over 2 million subscribers and billions of indexed digital records, wanted to become more data‑driven and improve communication and decision‑making across the company. VP Bill Yetman needed a powerful, easy‑to‑use analytics tool that teams would actually adopt rather than revert to spreadsheets.

By deploying Tableau as a self‑service visualization platform, Ancestry teams quickly began exploring customer behavior and operational trends—30 users created roughly 130 reports during a two‑week trial—and connected Tableau to their MPP data warehouse (including tables with up to 220 billion rows) for fast queries. The result was broad adoption (even finance moved off Excel), faster insights, better cross‑team communication, and clearer data‑driven strategic decisions.

Ancestry.com

Bill Yetman

Vice President Commerce, Data and Analytics